News

iTunes 7 causing headaches for some users

By LC Angell ● Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Almost immediately after Apple released iTunes 7 last week, bug reports started surfacing from users on both Mac OS X and Windows. Apple’s discussion boards and iLounge’s forums are both currently host to a number of complaints about the issues—which range from application crashes to audio problems—and the company recently began posting support documents to address some of the bugs. In a related issue, iTunes 7 users are also experiencing problems with getting purchased music working on the iTunes-ready Motorola ROKR and SLVR phones. According to numerous accounts, songs purchased from the iTunes Store will not play on the devices, even though CD-ripped tracks will. Meanwhile, AppleInsider claims that Apple is “well aware of the matter and that it’s toiling feverishly to rectify the issues.” The website claims that Apple hopes to release an update, presumably iTunes 7.0.1, as soon as possible.

Comments

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Audio breaks up badly and more often. This used to occur once every couple hours. Now it happens within minutes. A simple pause/play clears it up.

Can’t drag’n'drop to add album art to multiple items, unless I am editing the tags.

Album art retrieval frequently doesn’t do anything at all, though this is getting better, so I wonder if it wasn’t a problem accessing their overworked servers.

Doesn’t seem to be compatible with Last.fm - stuff I play doesn’t show up.

When iTunes first starts, the whole screen flashes black for a second. Irritating, but not problematic.

Posted by jasonengel on September 20, 2006 at 1:27 PM (CDT)

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My biggest complaint is how slow it is. Doing anything: just clicking on a track to highlight it, much less play it, takes forever. Deleting a track is a time-intensive process. Changing artwork, adding music, doing *anything* is slow, slow slow. It easts RAM like a fat man an a free buffet and pegs my dual-core AthlonFX 4200 at 100%, freezing the box and preventing me from doing anything else while I wait for things to process.

Obviously they rushed this out the door to meet Jobs’ speech deadline/release of new iPods. It needs help.

Posted by stark23x on September 20, 2006 at 2:20 PM (CDT)

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I wonder just what the legal ramifications are to releasing a piece of software “before its time” when there are so many bugs and issues just to “get it out there”, with a total disregard to Apple customers who are captive prisoners to iTunes. People who can’t use the merchandise that they have paid for and aren’t given a company sponsored option to reverse a flawed product. One that has cost customers many valueable hours of lost time and considerable grief to try to get iTunes 7 to work. Not to mention the cost to recover and or replace missing songs, artwork, videos, etc. etc. etc. I would hope that Apple who is notoriously litigious would be very concerned about a class action lawsuit that would hopefully stop this practice of releasing flawed products and depriving customers of the use of their merchandise.This post is also in the forums.

Posted by a3rdleg on September 20, 2006 at 2:30 PM (CDT)

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It’s almost like this program was released by Microsoft instead of Apple…

Posted by MikeUnwired on September 20, 2006 at 2:39 PM (CDT)

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My two problems at the moment:

1. I have a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook sound card that will only play out of two speakers when paying music through the new iTunes. I
had no problem with the last version or winamp, etc.

2. Music becomes distorted at random times forcing an iTunes restart to fix. This is by far the most annoying problem right now.

and yeah, it is slow at times even on my new core duo laptop.

Posted by wmurch3 on September 20, 2006 at 2:45 PM (CDT)

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Yeah, the “can’t drag’n’drop to add album art to multiple items” is SUCH a hassle. I hope this IS a bug and not just a poor decision.

Posted by superape on September 20, 2006 at 2:53 PM (CDT)

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iTunes 7.0 was almost unusable for me. I’ve already had to go back to the older 6.x version and that caused a couple of minor issues but were fixable. I was very, very surpised by all the bugs that have surfaced in this version of iTunes.

Posted by 3rdEye on September 20, 2006 at 2:54 PM (CDT)

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I cannot access the TV or movie sections, as iTunes freezes up and can do nothing. It is incredibly slow to sync to my iPod and it is an incredible RAM hog. My entire computer slows down and I can no longer surf the Internet and listen to music from iTunes at the same time. in addition, when iTunes is launched either manually or through connection of Ipod to computer, it takes iTunes 2-3 minutes to boot up. Apple just gave Microsoft and Zhune a present.

Posted by Slats325 on September 20, 2006 at 3:01 PM (CDT)

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for me iTunes always crashes whe nI go to the music store. It says something about not being able to display the album artwork correctly.

Posted by EM on September 20, 2006 at 3:02 PM (CDT)

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This is why I did not upgrade I waited to see what was going to be broken. Even after 7.01 is released I will still wait until the bugs are worked out of that then I will upgrade. As much as I am wanting to upgrade it is better to wait always is ... people are being used as “testers” those who upgrade to the newest version.

Posted by Brent on September 20, 2006 at 3:08 PM (CDT)

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I use a popular little iTunes script called “Rip To iPod.” One thing i noticed immediately was that this script now rips 3 copies of each song into my iTunes library and doesn’t put anything on my iPod. Wierd…

Posted by Steve on September 20, 2006 at 3:09 PM (CDT)

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Hell…I’m still using 5.5…and if I remember correctly, every version of itunes has been pretty buggy. Never install the first release of a piece of software from any company.

I’m still using the 60gig iPod photo, and until there is a reason for me to have to upgrade, either cause they stop supporting the older iTunes or I get a newer iPod, I probably won’t upgrade. Each upgrade uses more and more memory.

Posted by NY Coyote on September 20, 2006 at 3:12 PM (CDT)

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My gripe is that I no longer see the option to ‘Convert Selection to Mp3’ when I click on a song. Instead, it has been replaced with ‘Convert Selection to AAC’. Pooh!

Posted by Islareina on September 20, 2006 at 3:49 PM (CDT)

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Well this isn’t a huge problem or anything, and may not even be a bug at all -

But you can no longer rate songs just by clicking on the stars, you have right click to rate it.

Posted by Jayce on September 20, 2006 at 3:53 PM (CDT)

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Islareina - iTunes is giving you “Convert Selection to AAC” because AAC is set as the filetype under Preferences -> Advanced -> Importing. You can change this to MP3 if you like, but the sound quality of MP3 is not as good as AAC.

Posted by BradPDX on September 20, 2006 at 3:56 PM (CDT)

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I have installed iTunes 7 on 4 machines - 3 PCs and 1 Mac. It works just fine on 2 PCs and the Mac, but on one XP PC it won’t sync iPod Shuffles.

Memory usage is higher than 6.0.5, but not by a lot on these machines - perhaps 15% more.

Speed and responsiveness are down a bit, but again not by much on my machines. The Mac version is quite snappy on an iBook G4.

Some have said that iTunes 7 consumes enough resources to hinder running other apps at the same time, but I have not seen this behavior. Even on my old Win2000/866Mhz box you can play iTunes, surf the web, balance the checkbook and using MS Office all at the same time, no problem.

So, iTunes 7 needs an update but the problems are not universal.

Posted by BradPDX on September 20, 2006 at 4:03 PM (CDT)

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Definitely has been more of a resourse hog on our XP Pro box; I used to be able run multiple apps without a hiccup; now I have to forget about opening Photoshop while iT7 is open. Also, iT7 rips awfully slow when using the CD-RW drive (3x to 5x, most of the time), which used to be optical drive that cooked (18x to 25x for rips) on this machine. I know it’s not the drive itself, since other apps still rip at the faster speed.

Losing drag’n'drop to the album art window for multiple items IS irritating, but at least there’s a workaround for that. There’s NO workaround when the cursor goes all jumpy and device inputs all but disappear in other apps simply because iT7 is up and running.

And I used to think MusicMatch was bad…

Posted by flatline response on September 20, 2006 at 4:13 PM (CDT)

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whenever i played an audio file using itunes it was all distorted but i don’t have that problem anymore. and i have a nearly 7 year old computer with 384mb of ram that runs pretty decently. i can still run AIM, internet explorer, and itunes without much of a difference.

my one problem is with the album art. i use maunal update to sync my ipod [my 20 gig computer is shamed in the face of my 60 gig video ipod]. now my ipod only shows the album art for the songs and videos that are still on my computer. i can still see the album art on ipod with itunes but my ipod wont display them and i even unchecked and rechecked the “show album art on ipod” option.

Posted by i married an ipod on September 20, 2006 at 4:39 PM (CDT)

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My only issue is the rating takes a ton more effort. Everything else is great.

To those who seem to want to take Apple to court over their free software, good luck with that. Despite how much I tell my wife how important it is that I constantly sort and list and rate and organize my iTunes Library, their really isn’t a value loss that can be accounted for. What’s next? Are you going to sue NBC every time Satuday Night Live is horrible?

Posted by Jeff on September 20, 2006 at 5:06 PM (CDT)

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I’ve been running iTunes 7 on my 2 year old Mac G4, alongside Flash, Photoshop and iMovie, which are all quite memory intensive apps. Seems to be working fine here, and I love the new interface.